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14:18
What do you do when God seems absent from your story?
Maybe you still pray, read Scripture, and show up, but the closeness you once felt is gone. Does that mean you’ve done something wrong? Has God left?
John Ortberg explores those questions through John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century spiritual writer associated with the phrase dark night of the soul. John explains that this phrase can mean something more specific than a difficult season: a time when the pleasure and reassurance someone once found in spiritual practices seem to fade. For some, John of the Cross believed, that season can become part of learning to love and trust God more deeply.
Through the image of a weaned child in Psalm 131, John asks what it means to remain with God even when we are not receiving the comfort we want. He also remembers learning to ride a bike as his father ran beside him. When his father let go, the support felt different, but his father had not abandoned him.
If God feels hard to find right now, you do not need to manufacture a spiritual feeling today. You can bring your honest experience to him and ask for the grace to wait.
Scripture: Psalm 131:1–3
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Two topics that are real important for everybody, but especially for people that have organizational leadership positions. And uh that involves um uh having authority and being vulnerable. And he writes how often we think of those two qualities as though they're at opposite ends of a spectrum. Either you have a lot of authority or you're really vulnerable. But that they're actually two separate things on their own continuum, and so you can be high in authority, or you can be low in authority, and at the same time, you can be high in vulnerability, or you can be low in vulnerability, so that actually creates um a little two by two box. And um so if I'm high in authority and high vulnerability, that goes back to Genesis 1, to be made in the image of God has very high authority. Um and they were naked and not ashamed. To be naked is to be very vulnerable. So human beings were actually created to be high in authority and to be high in vulnerability. And if you think about Jesus, he is the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, the Messiah, that's very high in authority. And he humbled himself to obedience, obedience unto death, even death on a cross. You don't get more vulnerable than that. So he is the ultimate expression of humanity, he is the ultimate expression of carrying great authority and becoming deeply vulnerable.
SPEAKER_01
Because we see it uh, I mean, just to use a different word, we almost see it as high authority, authority and vulnerability almost as strong and weak. Yes. And there's no go ahead. I there's a temptation. I I know for me personally, I don't want to be seen as a weak leader. Yep. And there's that tension of like, I know I need to be vulnerable, but what's a safe level of vulnerability? But so you're saying it's not on the same spectrum. It's just two different That's right. Yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_02
And we were created um to be both extremely high in authority, made in the image of God, um, to reign, to exercise dominion, but also to be deeply vulnerable with one another, to be open, to not be hidden, to be naked in that sense, um, to be humble. Jesus was the most vulnerable person who ever lived. And again, he is our guide for leadership. He understood leadership. And so the reason that we confuse strength with invulnerable is that we think that um I should never have to experience wounds. I should never be hurt, and to be vulnerable is to be able to be wounded. So we think I will take advantage of my strength to put myself in a position where I'm secure and I don't have to face pain. And Jesus is perfectly content, glad to take on pain for the sake of love, because he always served out of love. But we think strength and leadership is about avoiding pain and suffering for myself. So what can happen then is uh so this is the Jesus quadrant here, this is where we want to be. Yep. High in authority, but also genuinely vulnerable. Um what happens for us is we decide um, I would like to be high in authority, but I don't want to be vulnerable. Yeah. I don't want to hurt. And so what can happen here is you, and you'll see this sometimes with pastors, sometimes with real skilled ones. Andy writes about this. They will tell certain stories in a sermon about uh little foibles in their parenting or their marriage that are not genuinely vulnerable, it's faux vulnerability, fake vulnerability. And so it looks to people like, oh, aren't they being vulnerable? So then people give them even more authority, but they're actually moving over here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they're developing the technique of fake vulnerability pseudo-vulnerability to enhance their authority. And uh, of course, what happens in the Garden of Eden is uh that Adam and Eve decide to eat the fruit, and what the temptation is your eyes will be open and you will be like God. God. So that you will not be vulnerable. That's the thought. So we'll eat the fruit, then we'll be like God, and we won't have to be vulnerable. And of course, what happens is it it causes them to be tremendously vulnerable, but now without a food. And we see this over and over again. Uh, you go to a party and you feel vulnerable, and so you start drinking alcohol, and it makes you feel like now I'm not vulnerable anymore. Now I have more authority and confidence. But eventually what happens is you become enslaved to alcohol. And so always when we try to move to this quadrant, and in the leadership world, so often that idea of I can be highly authoritative but without vulnerability, we gravitate towards that. That's always the temptation. That's what happened in Genesis 3, and it always leads down to here. And we see that in churches over and over again. Yeah. So I think that coming to understand that the Jesus model for leadership is high in authority and vulnerability. And again, coming back to one of the themes in these conversations, often for people who gravitate towards the spiritual formation side of kind of culture, um, they love vulnerability, they love to talk about it. They will roll over on their backs and expose their jugular to anybody. Yeah. And so they're uncomfortable with authority. Jesus was very comfortable with authority. And so folks on that side will need to learn to appropriately accept and manage authority. That's a good thing. Authority is something that is given by God, it's part of exercising dominion. On the other hand, people that are real into that leadership culture, they want lots of authority. They're very comfortable having power. They do not want to be vulnerable, and they will cultivate false vulnerability in order to convince other people that they're wonderful and spiritual and gain even more authority, but they're not genuinely vulnerable. And so then there's not authenticity. And then there's hiddenness. The more hidden we are, kills transformation. Yep, you are only as sick as your secrets. Secrets just destroy us.
SPEAKER_01
There's a quote I wrote down, it's from Spirit of Disciplines, Dallas Willard. Authentic transformation is possible if we are willing to do one thing, and that is to rearrange our life around the things that Jesus practiced in order to receive light and power from the Father.
Yeah, and that's that's the thesis of his book, The Spirit of the Disciplines. And that outside of the Bible, that's the book that has impacted me the most. And part of the reason that I did was I felt like I want to genuinely change, I want to be authentically different, but I wasn't sure how.
SPEAKER_01
Because you asked yourself that question, right? I mean, why aren't people changing? And then went on to say, Why am I not changing?
SPEAKER_02
Yep, right. And you know, at that point, I knew I was supposed to read the Bible and pray and have a daily quiet time, but it's like that wasn't quite doing it. And I would get frustrated with that. And uh coming back to AA at the end of uh every AA meeting, every 12-step meeting, people join hands, they'll pray, often the serenity prayer, maybe the Lord's Prayer, and then usually they will chant together to each other, keep coming back, it works. Or sometimes keep coming back, it works if you work it. And what they know is they have a program. The program is basically the 12 steps. That's a way of life. Uh, Christianity, the New Testament was called the way. Christians were called not people of the belief, but people of the way. And what's needed is a concrete, actionable way of life that's not mechanical, legalistic, or arbitrary, but has the power to bring about genuine transformation. And then AA, partly because God's strength is made perfect in weakness, that's the vulnerability thing. Um, very often addicts in their desperation are given the gift of genuine vulnerability. Because they just can't hide anymore.
SPEAKER_01
And usually they have been hiding for a long time. Well, and they know if they don't come back, they'll die.
SPEAKER_02
Like there's there's just that definitive but the reason they became addicts was that addiction, uh, alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, whatever it is, it promised high authority. Yeah. When I'm engaged in that behavior or used in that substance, I feel like I'm on top of the world. But I'm really not. But then it brings enslavement. So it puts you down in that quadrant where you have no authority and utter vulnerability. But the um strange, painful gift of that is a desperate need for a God that is so strong that it overcomes my resistance to authenticity. And I'm able to say, I'm a mess, I'm needy. And the problem that many of us have, especially in leadership, is our lives are manageable enough that we are not willing to go to desperately truthful authenticity.
SPEAKER_00
This conversation is a part of a series of conversations all about leadership called Rediscover Leadership. If you're interested in hearing the other conversations about this topic, you can just search up Rediscover Leadership with John Orberg. Anywhere that you get your podcast, we have it as a contained podcast, or head over to our website, become new.com. I loved that line. Our lives are often manageable enough that we don't have to come to a place of desperately truthful authenticity. But that's where real inner transformation begins. That place of desperately truthful authenticity. I hope you take with you through your day that idea of authority and vulnerability and look for an opportunity today to be vulnerable with a trusted friend, someone that you can confide in, to share your heart, your burdens, your struggles with, and maybe just ask them to pray for you. They don't have to fix it or solve it, to just pray for you. At Become New, you can spend 10 minutes every weekday with Dr. John Orberg to get a passage of scripture for that day, a grounding thought and perspective on life and the kingdom of God, and a practice to take with you into your day as you're following Jesus. To make sure you never miss an episode, the easiest way is just text the word new to the number 51504, and we'll send you a text whenever a new episode is dropped completely for free, because we are a nonprofit, and all of these resources are free for you. I'm Tim, I'm the channel host of Become New. I'm so glad you joined us today. I hope you stick around.
